Enlightened AIDA Marketing
Enlightened AIDA Marketing
By Chuck Groot
AIDA = tried but true, the famous formula that makes your ads, your advertising literature, your marketing work.
Attention – you must grab your reader or listeners attention. We forget that we are not dealing with a captive audience; people are allowing us in to their heads. So in order to get them to pay attention to what we have to say, we need to seize their attention. The best way to do this is with a snappy, hard-hitting, headline.
So why? Why should you care so much about your headline? Because of this sound:
*Click*
That one sound, that single action is the difference between people getting your message and one that gets skipped over for another with a title that is better than yours.
Here is a rather famous quote from the Godfather of Advertising himself, David Ogilvy:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”
One way I work on getting headlines is by writing at least twenty possible headlines down on a piece of paper. After the first five or six it gets really hard but eventually, the cream will rise to the top and by the twentieth I have a winner.
Interest – once the prospective client has been enticed by the bait so to speak, we need to keep their interest. Tell a story about your product, you should mention every benefit, every detail that sets you apart, everything that would entice you to buy from you. Often you have only one chance with this particular customer.
As Simon Kelly wrote; “Stories define us. Since early cave dwellers left their graffiti in Lascaux, listening to and telling stories have moved people. Stories are powerful: They give meaning and context to what would otherwise be a collection of easily forgettable facts. Stories invoke the imagination so that listeners begin to own them almost as much as the teller. In fact, there’s a growing body of research that points to the power of narrative not just as a way to engage people, but as the only way to change deeply entrenched views.”
Here is an example I used which brought in many wedding contracts for me.
“The house may not have been crying but Mrs. Schmidt certainly was. Her one and only son just got married and now that he had moved with his beautiful bride to his new posting she spends hours gazing at the pictures we took.
A month after the wedding she wrote us and said that every time she looks at the beautiful portraits we created it’s as if she relives the entire wedding day all over again.
Dear Mr. Groot,
Thank you, thank you, and thank you. The portraits of Wolfgang and Sarah are of such high quality and so real, that I feel the warmth of the hugs, I can taste the food, I can hear the music, I can see the couple walking down the garden path, and the emotion of the love caught in each picture carries me back to my own wedding.
And I must say that the album itself is so beautiful I have never ever seen anything like it. But I must say that I am most impressed with you and your staff and how you conducted yourselves on the day of the wedding. I couldn’t believe how professional you looked, how efficient you performed, and how each and every shot you created was like a mini love story.
Also the level of service before, during, and after the wedding was far beyond that of any company that I had ever dealt with. I love my parent’s album and would highly recommend Old Masters Studio to anyone.
Sincerely,
Hildegard Schmidt”
Desire - As you're building the reader's interest, you also need to help them understand how what you're offering can help them in a real way. The main way of doing this is by appealing to their personal needs and wants.
A good way of building the reader's desire for your offering is to link features and benefits. Hopefully, the significant features of your offering have been designed to give a specific benefit to members of your target market. There’s two things that motivate people: what’s in it for them and what other people are doing. Many advertisers will try to tap into emotional needs to satisfy the former.
In addition to the above, make it irresistible for a customer to support you by offering risk free trial propositions – along with generous guarantees and bonuses – that the customer has nothing to lose and everything to gain. Give the trial propositions as an inducement as well as a free “gift” for their trouble.